The New Afghanistan Strategy

The entertaining host of NPR’s “On the Media,” Bob Garfield, was kind enough last week to feature this blog’s ongoing tour of the stimulus bill. During a portion of the interview that did not air, he asked if I was really going to see this tedium-laced project all the way through. Do we Protestant workaholics schooled on Pop Warner football fields by off-duty policemen acting out their Woody Hayes fantasies have a choice about such matters? A little late in life to make that suggestion! Yes, of course, we will finish. Not a quitter. However, as the bill does not contemplate the expenditure of its funds until September 2010, we do theoretically have some time. I’ll try to wrap things up over the next couple of months. The occasional post about other subjects should not be interpreted as procrastination!

A few words, then, about President Obama’s announced strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, which the Administration rolled out in Washington on Friday with a speech, a few interviews, and a day-long series of off-the-record briefings in the Eisenhower Executive office building, next door to the White House. With my think-tank hat on, I’ve floated around the edges of the policy review discussions since earlier this year. The review was led by Bruce Reidel, a former C.I.A. analyst who came over to the National Security Council from Brookings; Douglas Lute, a retired general who served as war czar in the Bush Administration, and has been asked to stay on at the N.S.C.; and Richard Holbrooke, the president’s special envoy to the region, based at the State Department. In addition to these three, General David Petraeus, the Centcom commander, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have been involved, along with their staffs. Holbrooke and Petraeus will be the implementing leaders forward from here, with Lute anchoring at the White House. Reidel, who did terrific work, is going back to Brookings, as he said he would from the beginning.

In a sense, this review has been going on since last summer, when the Bush Administration initiated a policy review as it headed for the exits. Most of the key policy ideas Obama and his aides announced on Friday have been more or less obvious from the beginning of the year. These include: Addressing Pakistan and Afghanistan as a unified theater of operations, as the Taliban and Al Qaeda do; building up the Afghan National Army, so that U.S. and N.A.T.O. forces can gradually withdraw from combat; reinforcing stability in the two countries with more vigorous regional diplomacy, involving India, Iran, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia; improving population security in Afghanistan; and rebalancing engagement in Pakistan to support the civilian sector and to hold the Army more accountable. A sixty-day policy review was formally necessary so that President Obama and his advisers could systematically decide on their priorities and also so that they could develop language to explain their plans and goals to an increasingly skeptical American public. But the review was also an exercise in building up understanding and support for the policy and the investments it will require in Congress, among allies, in the media, and so on.

During the review process, however, at least two things happened that were not preconceived. There was a serious debate about how to define American goals in Afghanistan. To some extent the review provided a proxy – an early test – for a larger argument inside the Obama Administration, and within the Democratic Party (and for that matter, the Republican Party) between reviving realists, who want to scale back American ambition and reemphasize interests over values in foreign policy, and neo-liberals, who want to rescue the Wilsonian precepts of democracy promotion and universal rights from the damage caused to them by the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq and its unilateral overreach. At first, within the Obama Administration, it seemed as if the two schools might use the Afghanistan-Pakistan problem as an abstract theater for their ideological battles, and in doing so, fail to see the pressing issues in their granular specificity. In fact, this did not occur. Partly, this was because no matter whether you are a realist or a neo-Wilsonian, it is obvious that America has vital interests in a stable Pakistan and a stable Afghanistan (at least in part because a stable Pakistan is not likely if Afghanistan’s Pashtun population is in a state of revolutionary fervor). Given the inheritance from the Bush Administration, the policies necessary to chase that outcome are essentially the same no matter what ideological framework you set them in. Also—and this I did not witness directly, but I infer it—President Obama’s method of judicial supervision of policy development played a role, toward the end, in forcing a practical synthesis out of the initial, more ideological debates about goal-setting.

One other thing happened during the review that was not preconceived, I think. For the first time in decades, the entire American foreign policy and national security system—the uniformed military, the State Department, the N.S.C.—really bore down on the problem of Pakistan, in all of its daunting complexity. Past patterns of failure in American analysis and policy toward Pakistan—such as credulity toward the Army and the military intelligence service, I.S.I.; the tendency to invest heavily in personalities, rather than in sustainable policy; and a general naĬveté and lack of attention—gave way gradually to hard-headed, pragmatic discourse about the true nature of the problems in Pakistan, and U.S. options for addressing them. This change is not one hundred percent complete within the bureaucracy, but it marks a considerable leap forward in American thinking on Pakistan. Reidel deserves some of the credit because he came to the review with a clear, skeptical eye and a great deal of pragmatic experience. As a result, although it will not always be visible in public, the Obama Administration is about to undertake the most realistic, least self-deluding attempt to use American resources and leverage pursue stability in Pakistan in the history of U.S. involvement in South Asia.

That, unfortunately, is no guarantee of success. Conceiving a very difficult problem correctly does not mean that you can solve it. Preventing the Taliban and Al Qaeda from expanding their Gaza-like base in Western Pakistan or making further inroads against the state; encouraging and coercing the Pakistan Army to break with its long history of support for jihadi clients; rescuing the Pakistani economy from collapse; establishing a sustainable basis for power-sharing between civilian politicians and the Army that does not in turn weaken the state against its insurgent enemies—it is hard to imagine a more difficult or more treacherous complex of problems. In Afghanistan, it is almost certainly not too late to set things right. In Pakistan, it is harder to be sure. In early 2008, Pakistani voters overwhelmingly rejected the country’s religious parties and made clear that they do not wish to live in a Taliban-ruled country. It’s not clear, however, whether the Pakistani state is strong and unified enough to deliver to its population the stability and normalcy that a majority of Pakistanis would prefer.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.